Order Bars in ggplot2 bar graph

The key with ordering is to set the levels of the factor in the order you want. An ordered factor is not required; the extra information in an ordered factor isn't necessary and if these data are being used in any statistical model, the wrong parametrisation might result — polynomial contrasts aren't right for nominal data such as this.

## set the levels in order we want
theTable <- within(theTable, 
                   Position <- factor(Position, 
                                      levels=names(sort(table(Position), 
                                                        decreasing=TRUE))))
## plot
ggplot(theTable,aes(x=Position))+geom_bar(binwidth=1)

In the most general sense, we simply need to set the factor levels to be in the desired order. If left unspecified, the levels of a factor will be sorted alphabetically. You can also specify the level order within the call to factor as above, and other ways are possible as well.

theTable$Position <- factor(theTable$Position, levels = c(...))

I think the already provided solutions are overly verbose. A more concise way to do a frequency sorted barplot with ggplot is

ggplot(theTable, aes(x=reorder(Position, -table(Position)[Position]))) + geom_bar()

It's similar to what Alex Brown suggested, but a bit shorter and works without an anynymous function definition.

Update

I think my old solution was good at the time, but nowadays I'd rather use forcats::fct_infreq which is sorting factor levels by frequency:

require(forcats)

ggplot(theTable, aes(fct_infreq(Position))) + geom_bar()

Using scale_x_discrete (limits = ...) to specify the order of bars.

positions <- c("Goalkeeper", "Defense", "Striker")
p <- ggplot(theTable, aes(x = Position)) + scale_x_discrete(limits = positions)

@GavinSimpson: reorder is a powerful and effective solution for this:

ggplot(theTable,
       aes(x=reorder(Position,Position,
                     function(x)-length(x)))) +
       geom_bar()